Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the
discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include …

Scheduling lectures or exams for universities is a large and complex task. There are many
different departments and faculties, each with their own ideas about how and when their …

Metaheuristics are the most exciting development in approximate optimization techniques of
the last two decades. They have had widespread successes in attacking a variety of difficult …

The timetabling problem consists in scheduling a sequence of lectures between teachers
and students in a prefixed period of time (typically a week), satisfying a set of constraints of …

Examination timetabling is an important operational problem in many schools, colleges and
universities. The authors have developed a computerized examination timetabling system …

As well as nearly always belonging to the class of NP-complete problems, university
timetabling problems can be further complicated by the often idiosyncratic requirements …

Course timetabling is a multi-dimensional NP-Complete problem that has generated
hundreds of papers and thousands of students have attempted to solve it for their own …

Engineering and technology have been continuously providing examples of difficult
optimization problems. In this chapter we shall present the tabu search technique, which …

In recent years the processing speed of computers has increased dramatically. This in turn
has allowed search algorithms to execute more iterations in a given amount of real-time …

It is well known that timetabling problems can be very difficult to solve, especially when
dealing with particularly large instances. Finding near-optimal results can prove to be …